After a good deal of lashback from their Beacon advertsing system’s ability to broadcast user data, it was announced this morning that the policy will be changed.
More information:
Wired Science closed out tonight’s episode (11/27) with a catchy video starring Keepon, a happy little dancing robot. The video from YouTube is embedded below (Keepon Dancing to Spoon’s “Don’t You Evah”).
The still before the video started reads:
Tags: Hideki Kozima, Keepon, Marek Michalowski, Robot, Robotics, Spoon, Television, Video, viral, Wired, Wired Science, YouTubeKeepon, the dancing yellow robot, was designed and built by his video co-star, roboticist and psychologist Hideki Kozima, for his clinical research with autistic children. Mark Michalowski is the grad student who programs Keepon’s smooth moves.
Keeping it simple can make a difference, and Poverty.com’s sister site FreeRice is a perfect example. FreeRice has two goals:
Execution against these goals resulted in a very casual online word game which, for each correctly answered multiple-choice question, contributes 10 grains of rice to end world hunger.
In a quick session (that actually became somewhat of a contest with my wife) we contributed several hundred grains. It doesn’t sound like much, but it all adds up—between October 7th (when the program launched) and yesterday (November 20th) over 3 billion world-hunger-ending grains of rice have been racked up. Yesterday alone FreeRice donated over 218 million grains.
Wondering who is paying for all this? There are small advertisements placed on the FreeRice site. The money generated by the advertisements buys the rice. Thankfully the ads are placed on the site in a restrained manner. A ClickZ blog posting notes that Apple, American Express, Toshiba and Macy’s are among the participating advertisers.
The game itself (while incredibly simple) is fun, has an addictive quality, and provides an assessment of your progress by way of 50 game ‘levels.’ The game was designed with everyone in mind:
FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the “outer fringe” of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.
There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.
Ready to test your vocabulary? Go help end world hunger! Report back with what level you made it to!
The One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) XO laptop is on sale in the U.S. by way of their “Give One Get One” program. Sales kicked off on Monday (November 12th) and will be running until November 26th. As if getting your hands on the XO to kick the tires isn’t enough, T-Mobile is offering one year of complimentary WiFi access at their HotSpots for all donors. From the OLPC site:
This is the first time the revolutionary XO laptop has been made available to the general public. For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving).
It was also announced last that Maxis (Electronic Arts) has donated the original SimCity game to the project, allowing for free distribution of the addictive classic which was originally developed for the Commodore 64.
Don Hopkins created a UNIX variant of the game in the past and has been advocating the use of SimCity for educational purposes for years. Hopkins commented on a Slashdot article earlier this year:
“The goal is to enable the open-source community to renovate SimCity and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert’s ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay’s ideas about interactive user interfaces and object-oriented programming, Ben Shneiderman’s ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization, and many exciting ideas about multiplayer games, blogging, storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned from World of WarCraft, The Sims, Spore, etc,”
The cause sounds noble. One way or the other games will make it to the OLPC. Let’s hope the educational angle triumphs.More about SimCity on the OLPC XO from Don Hopkins:
Bug Labs is bringing a mashup mentality to hardware by way of a series of modules which snap together not unlike the way Legos would. The BUGbase and the BUGmodules don’t look like children’s toys, nor do they look like Radio Shack geek tech. They look like something you might pay good money for at BestBuy.
Ease of development is emphasized. Projects begin with a BUGbase which is described on their web site as “…a fully programmable and ‘hackable’ Linux computer…” Examples of modules you can snap to the base include a GPS unit, a Digital Camera/Videocam, a Motion Detector, and a color, touch-sensitive LCD screen.
Bug Labs envisions device building as an experience that can be enjoyed by both the novice and the advanced do-it-yourselfer. Since the hardware clicks together, the next engineering challenge is the underlying software. A description of the software environment from the BUG site is quoted below:
BUG is built entirely with open source software. BMI, the BUG Module Interface, attaches devices to the BUG. Device-based services and applications are dynamically available based on which modules are connected to the BUG. Higher up the stack is Java, which hosts a service-oriented component runtime called OSGi.
As the development community shares their hardware and software creations a programming-free scenario also emerges. In a recent podcast Bug Labs’ CEO Peter Semmelhack describes a future where a builder combines a few bricks together and interfaces with the BUG SDK where (s)he is presented with the top applications currently being used for that hardware configuration. Software can be downloaded onto the device without the need to start from scratch.
The BUGbase, aforementioned modules and SDK are all slated to ship before the end of the year.Interested? You may want to catch BUG Labs speaking at SXSW 2008. For more information including a list of additional modules visit the BUG Labs web site.
Tags: Applications, BUG Labs, BUGbase, BUGmodules, Hardware, Industrial Design, Java, LEGO, LEGO Mindstorms, Lego NXT, Lego RCX, linux, Open Source, OSGi, Peter Semmelhack, Programming, SXSW